Send us a message

Today’s front end developers have more work to do than ever to create a functioning, responsive, fast, good-looking website. We have differing screen resolutions, browser support, network speeds and other considerations all buzzing around, jockeying for highest priority and attention during development. Let’s make that development easier by automating away some of the grunt work.

In this workshop, we’ll use Grunt as an automation framework and set up streamlined workflows to help us work more efficiently, producing better, faster sites. We will also optionally cover gulp and broccoli as the automation framework, for attendees who prefer these technologies.

What We’ll Cover

Setting up the automation framework

Automatic browser refresh with BrowserSync

Integrating CSS preprocessors

Sprite generation

Asset aggregation and compression

Regression testing

Asset analysis for redundancy checking

Command line tricks, scripting

Who Should Attend

This workshop is for intermediate and advanced web developers and designers who want to streamline their site development workflow.

What You Should Know

Experience building websites is needed to take full advantage of the workshop. Workshop content will be adjusted to attendees’ needs, covering command line basics and GUI options as needed.

What You Should Bring

Bring a laptop with a project you want to automate, your site development setup and a modern browser or two.

What to Expect

We’ll send out a questionnaire before the workshop so that we cover not only the general topics listed above, but also the specific requirements of workshop attendees. After we receive your responses, you’ll receive custom instructions on laptop setup, reflective of your chosen operating system and development platform.

You’ll have a full day of learning, and leave with your project set up for automating various parts, as well as full workshop notes, links, and tutorials.

Yeah, but… food?

Morning coffee, tea, and snacks along with a lunch will be provided by Refresh Portland sponsor nGen Works.

About Kitt Hodsden

Kitt Hodsden is the 47th laziest developer in the world, a feat which takes considerable effort. That effort has taken her to Twitter, where she and her team built a unified platform for the company’s supplementary websites. Before working at Twitter, Kitt co-founded CodingClan LLC, a small web development firm specializing in the rapid development and deployment of Drupal-based community and commerce websites; co-founded Hacker Dojo, a community space for hackers, tinkerers, makers and programmers in Mountain View, California; worked on Shrek and Antz; and built enough websites to lose count.

When not organizing a conference or study group, preaching the gospel of lazy productivity or building another website, she can be found playing ultimate, rain or shine.